Free Spirit Mind

Not my photo – found it on the internet.

Been out hunting nearly every weekend since Jan.1st. Haven’t been as successful as I’d like, though most of the hunting has been on public land which is subject to overpressure from other hunters. Of the 6 trips I’ve made, I only came up with one doe and two hogs. Only one of the hogs was taken on public lands. The doe and the other hog were taken on a friend of mine’s ranch.

The ranch is heavily populated with deer and hogs – overpopulated in my opinion. On a spread around 600 acres, we counted more than 60 individual antlerless, and one small buck. The lack of bucks seems to reflect that most of the hunters on the ranch target large bucks and ignore the does and antlerless or spikes. This doesn’t bother me so much… I’m pretty much out there to enjoy the sport and fill the freezer with fresh meat.

The public lands are another matter entirely. During general deer season, you may as well forget about it. The land is useless for deer hunting. On one lot that spans more than 26,000 acres, I’ve hiked probably 50% of it scouting and looking for ANY deer sign, and come up with bupkis. Nada. On the other hand, it’s pretty well infested with wild hog. They are EVERYWHERE – problem is, on a piece of land that big, figuring out where they are and at what time. I’ve got their habits down pretty well. Well enough to the point that I can pretty much head out at any given time, temp, and moon phase and know where they are going to be. But that scouting took a lot of time to go over the land. But the time paid off and I harvested a nice boar last week. He weighed probably 200 pounds live weight.

Which brings me to the other downside of hunting public lands. You’ve got to hike a good way in before you get to where the game is. This guy was about 1.5 miles from the nearest vehicle access (they don’t allow ATVs, and I don’t have a mule or horse), meaning I had to hump 200# of meat out by myself over rough terrain. Not fun. I’ve got a little sled setup that I assembled out of a tarp and some rope that works pretty well. It packs in light and compact, and slides over the rocks and undergrowth with (relative) ease. In it’s cinched up “haul” mode, it also wraps up around the carcass and protects it from limbs and twigs.

I’m heading back out with a buddy of mine who is new to hunting. He’s been out once before with me early in the season, but I hadn’t had time to scout the land, and there were a couple dozen other hunters out there when we went, making our attempts unsuccessful. Now that general deer season is over (and the fact that the Superbowl is on when we’re going) I expect we’ll have all 26,000 acres to ourselves. Hopefully we’ll come back with a couple of nice boars.

I’m putting pics of the boar I took on public lands and the doe behind the cut for those gentle readers to find such things disturbing.

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For all you Whedon fans who don’t happen to own it, Firefly the complete series is on sale at Best Buy for just $12.99.

I know, I know, Best Buy is teh eeeeevil. But they’re also cheap.

I’ve already got my copy, but for your friends who don’t have it, it’d make a nice stocking stuffer.

It’s that time of year again – Soldier’s Angels Project Valour-IT is having their annual fundraiser, and this year I’m on Team Marines again.

Major Chuck Zeigenfuss gave his right nut for Project Valour-IT (literally)… surely you can give just a little. Project Valour-IT works to provide laptops, voice recognition software, rehab technology, and other IT related items to help injured and paralyzed soldiers from all branches be able to recover and adapt to their injuries.

Click the link to donate!

The fundraiser runs through November 11th.

The .gov takes in 2,674,007,818,000 a year. That’s 2.67 Trillion. Our national debt just rose from 9.98 Trillion to 12.87 Trillion. By 2014 it will have blossomed to a minimum of 18.35 Trillion.

Let’s put this in numbers we can easily wrap our heads around.

Let’s say you are the head of your household, the sole breadwinner, and you make $45,000 a year. You also have a mortgage. It is $168,000, with a monthly payment of $1344. But, one year, you decide to take out a second mortgage. Now you owe $217,000. And your monthly payment goes up to $1736. And your income hasn’t changed (in reality, federal tax revenues are likely to fall, but let’s disregard that for the sake of argument.)

If you’re making $45,000 in take home pay, that gives you a budget of only $3750. Your large but not unaffordable monthly payment of $1344 is now almost half of your monthly budget. But that’s not all. Every year you continue to take on more and more mortgage debt. By 2014, you owe $309,269, and your monthly payment is $2,474, leaving you with only $1276 a month for electricity and grocery. See where we’re going here?

The above example is exactly what our nation is doing.

Our nation’s debt is increasing at the same rate as our hypothetical homeowner. The numbers are bigger, but the relationship is the same. The housing bubble is just foreshadowing what we are doing on a national scale. Every year we are spending more than we take in, leaving us with even MORE debt to service. By 2025, we will have to take every dime we take in as tax revenue (based on current rates) and spend it just to service debt. We will have none left over. At that point, every dime the government spends will be borrowed.

The only solution is devaluing the dollar. Oh sure, we COULD stop spending so much and start saving again… but we all know that won’t happen. We’ve got a government that is convinced that the best way out of debt is to spend more, and a citizenry urging them on hoping to get just a little more milk from the government teat. Stop spending? Please… I can hear the whining already.

We could raise taxes too… but how likely is that? And even if taxes are raised, through the implementation of a Euro-style VAT or some other similar program, if spending isn’t reduced, we’ll simply be delaying the inevitable.

So, we’ll take the only solution left: print more money. Folks, inflation is coming, and it’s coming very soon. The Fed has opened the taps and is selling bonds to anyone who will bid, but bidding has slowed almost to a crawl. Long term bonds aren’t selling at all, so we’re selling short term bonds. This is akin to living off of a credit card instead of a cash taken out of a second mortgage. It’s crazy – anyone who can balance a checkbook should know that, but it’s exactly what our government is doing.

If you don’t already, you need to start moving your money to hard assets: Real estate, gold, silver, etc. Even the Euro and Asian currency markets are safer than the US markets right now. Deflation may be the word of the day right now, but it’s just the tide going before the tsunami hits.